Niftacular.
Do you ever find yourself staring at a blinking caret on a blank page for hours on end, for want of a way to structure your ideas? Ever toyed with your own personal Theory of Everything that you never commit to paper and eventually forget about? Need a method for making sense of your notes? Try Freemind. It’s a free application that generates a diagram for linking words, images, ideas, hyperlinks with each other using an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
Features:
Fully functional HTML, be it www links or links to local files.
Supports folding (collapsing of large, unwieldy sections of your diagram)
Fast one-click navigation, including folding / unfolding on one click and following links on one click at the same time
Smart drag-and-drop, including the possibility to copy nodes or copy style of nodes; dragging and dropping of multiple selected nodes; dropping of texts or list of files from outside
Smart copying and pasting into, including pasting of links from HTML or structuring the pasted content on the basis of the number of leading spaces in a line; pasting of lists of selected files
Smart copying and pasting from, including plain text and RTF (MS Wordpad, MS Word, MS Outlook messages).
Maps can be exported as webpages, with folding (see example)
Maps can be exported as .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files for printing
Screenshots: 1, 2, 3, 4
In the three days since I’ve downloaded Freemind, I’ve used it to generate a conceptual framework for a research proposal, an outline for a report on resource wars, and a reviewer for a theory class - shit I'd usually take a whole week to wade through. It certainly helped with organizing ideas into systematic trains of thought, cataloguing and contextualizing concepts within a framework, and developing raw, unstructured thoughts to the point of coherence and clarity. I’ve found that seeing all my ideas mapped out on a neat, structured diagram also helped with generating new ideas as well, if only because it freed up my mind from having to do the organizing on its own.
Features:
Fully functional HTML, be it www links or links to local files.
Supports folding (collapsing of large, unwieldy sections of your diagram)
Fast one-click navigation, including folding / unfolding on one click and following links on one click at the same time
Smart drag-and-drop, including the possibility to copy nodes or copy style of nodes; dragging and dropping of multiple selected nodes; dropping of texts or list of files from outside
Smart copying and pasting into, including pasting of links from HTML or structuring the pasted content on the basis of the number of leading spaces in a line; pasting of lists of selected files
Smart copying and pasting from, including plain text and RTF (MS Wordpad, MS Word, MS Outlook messages).
Maps can be exported as webpages, with folding (see example)
Maps can be exported as .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files for printing
Screenshots: 1, 2, 3, 4
In the three days since I’ve downloaded Freemind, I’ve used it to generate a conceptual framework for a research proposal, an outline for a report on resource wars, and a reviewer for a theory class - shit I'd usually take a whole week to wade through. It certainly helped with organizing ideas into systematic trains of thought, cataloguing and contextualizing concepts within a framework, and developing raw, unstructured thoughts to the point of coherence and clarity. I’ve found that seeing all my ideas mapped out on a neat, structured diagram also helped with generating new ideas as well, if only because it freed up my mind from having to do the organizing on its own.